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Thursday, July 12, 2012

MPlayer is a very common tool in the Linux world, it is usually used for
watching videos or running audios. However, MPlayer has many more
features and options. Here are 4 cool tricks you can do with MPlayer:

Take screenshots from video

To manually take screenshots from a video ( for example, video.avi), you can open the terminal and run the following command:

mplayer -vf screenshot video-file

After you hit enter, MPlayer will start to run the video at its original
resolution. To take screenshots of the video in any moment, you just
need to press the letter "s". Each time you press "s", one screenshot
will be taken.

Convert files into .wav format

You already know how to use ffmpeg to convert an audio file to .wav format
and you can use MPlayer to do the task too. The cool thing about
MPlayer is that you can directly convert the audio of a video file into a
separate .wav file too. The command to do the trick is:

Just replace input.avi with whatever video or audio file you want. With
this command, MPlayer will ignore the video part and convert the audio
part into a .wav file.

Play videos in the terminal

You can use MPlayer to play videos in the linux terminal. The drawback
with this trick is that the video will be played in ASII mode so the
video quality sucks. However, you will gain a lot of coolness points for
this trick.

The command to play a video in the terminal will be:

mplayer -vo caca video.avi

If you want to watch the video in black and white color, the command will be:

mplayer -vo aa video.avi

Just replace video.avi with any other video you want.

Here is an example of a video running in the terminal:

Create GIF images
There are many tools to create animated GIF images and MPlayer is one of
them. To create a GIF image from a video, the command you can use is:

"video-file": the video from which you want to create the GIF
"-ss 0:00:15" : when the GIF starts in the video, replace 0:00:15 with what you want
"-endpos 15": the length of the GIF, replace 15 with what you want
"gif89a:fps=24" : 24 here means 24 frames/seconds
"output=animated.gif" : change the animated.gif into the file name you want
"scale=400:280" : dimensions of the GIF

After several months of reconstruction, the popular Linux.org site
quietly relaunched what it terms an "alpha release" on May 4.
Though the site's Twitter feed makes reference of an announcement to
be made on May 7, no such announcement seems to be visible on the usual
Internet news sources.
The new site seems to have much of the original content the old one
did, as well as new articles that have been added since the site's soft
launch in May. The site is still adding features: RSS feeds and inline
commenting were added in mid-May, and more features are being hinted at.

With the plethora of open source desktop environments available at
the moment, it’s hard to keep track of all the different features sets.
And since KDE, which has recently become my interface of choice,
arguably enjoys less media love than alternatives such as GNOME and
Unity, it seems only fair to highlight some of the feature changes in
its next upcoming release, KDE 4.9. Read on for a look — and, just
maybe, a few compelling reasons to give KDE a try.
To be honest, I’ve always had a bizarre uneasiness describing myself
as a KDE user, a hesitancy I owe mostly to KDE developers’ obsession
with inserting the letter “K” wherever possible. That’s a trait I
associate with a certain producer of oversugared donuts, not to mention
products such as “krazy” glue. It doesn’t make me think of quality
software.
Nonetheless, amid all the confusion and upheaval that has struck the
Linux world over the last couple years as a new generation of desktop
environments — many of them a bit less mature than some might like —
have hit the stage, KDE has just worked the best for me. And so it’s
been my desktop environment of choice for several months now on my
Ubuntu 12.04 system, although I keep Unity and GNOME Shell on hand as
well just in case I need to remind myself why I switched to KDE.

A new version of LibreOffice has been released recently that comes full of many bug fixes and better stability. For further information about LibreOffice 3.5.5, you can visit this page. In this tutorial, you will get instructions for the installation of LibreOffice 3.5.5 under Ubuntu 12.04/Linux Mint 13 (Maya).

LibreOffice 3.5.5 Installation

To install LibreOffice 3.5.5 on Ubuntu 12.04/Linux Mint 13 (Maya), run these commands via the terminal:

UNetbootin has been updated recently to version 577 which
added support for more Linux distributions. In this tutorial, we will
see how to install this latest version under Ubuntu/Linux Mint from our
custom PPA. As a reminder, UNetbootin is an application with GUI that
allows users to create bootable Live USB drives (flash drives) for most
Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, BackTrack, CentOS,
openSUSE, etc.
WIth UNetbootin, you can either download distros from the Internet or
use ISO files stored in your hard drive to create Live USB drives. For
more information about this application, you can refer to this website.

UNetbootin Installation

To install UNetbootin 577 on Ubuntu 12.10/12.04/11.10/11.04 or Linux
Mint 13 (Maya) or older, start the terminal and run these commands:

Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint
project, announced earlier today, July 12th, that the Release Candidate
of the upcoming Linux Mint 13 KDE Edition operating system is available
for download and testing.

There's no official release announcement at the time of writing this,
but Linux Mint 13 KDE RC is already available for download, distributed
as Live DVD ISO images supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

About Linux Mint

Linux Mint is and will always be an elegant, easy-to-use, up-to-date,
100% free and comfortable Linux operating system based on the very
popular Ubuntu OS.

It offers paid commercial support to
companies and individuals. Also, free community support is available
from the forums and the IRC channel.Download Linux Mint 13 RC KDE

With yesterday's updates, Canonical made
some changes to the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating
system, regarding the two panel indicators.

More exactly, the Fast-User Switching indicator has been removed and it is now integrated in the existing Session menu indicator.

That's not all, as the Session menu indicator has been completely revamped, and it now features the highly anticipated "Restart" option,
and the "Displays", "Startup Applications" and "Software Up to Date"
entries have been replaced with the "About This Computer" and "Ubuntu
Help" entries.

Moreover, the "Lock Screen" entry has been
renamed to "Lock", as you can see in the screenshot above, showing a
before and after comparison of the Session menu indicator.

Overall, the panel now looks simple, awaiting new indicators. However,
considering that Ubuntu 12.10 is in Alpha development stage, everything
is subject to change.

Canonical announced yesterday, July 11th,
on the Ubuntu One blog that they will completely remove support for
Facebook from the Ubuntu One cloud storage.

I always
thought that technologies are getting improved all the time with new
features, but it looks like they are also regressing, as importing and
syncing Facebook contacts option from the Ubuntu One web dashboard has
been removed.

Users who already imported their Facebook
contacts into the Ubuntu One web dashboard can still manually add new
ones or edit the existing contacts.

"As
we communicated back in December, we’re continuing to invest in our new
data sync infrastructure U1DB. Therefore, we’ve been gradually turning
off services that are reliant on the old infrastructure and providing
little value to users in their current form."

"Contacts will also be one of the first services that we will build on top of our upcoming new data sync infrastructure." - was stated in the blog announcement.

MeMaker is a simple open-source tool that allows you to create cool
avatars to use in wherever you like, ie forums, facebook, twitter, chat
room, image boards ... The package's size is very small but it has many
options and features. You can choose various styles for your avatar:
plazmoid, cocohead, artistic, glyphface, animal-crackers, plastidudes
and free-styles. When creating your avatar, there are also many
different types of hair, eye, mouth, face shape ... for you to choose to
make your avatar unique. After finishing the avatar, you can save it as
PNG, BMP, SVG or Gnome avatar. The exported images will have a
transparent background.

Here is an avatar I created with the Freestyle style:

And another one with the Artistic style:

Since MeMaker is in the repository of Ubuntu and Linux Mint, if you are
using one of these distros, you can search for it in the Software Center
or use the following command to install it: